LSI Assigned Patent

LSI Corp., Milpitas, CA has been assigned a patent (8,195,854) developed by Ankit Sihare, Madhya Pradesh, India, for a "method and mechanism to provide HA storage solution by load balancing and fault tolerance support in the storage controller cards and HBAs."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Disclosed is a method and mechanism for virtualizing the resources of multiple physical storage controller cards/HBAs available to a host computer system into a single virtual controller. An Advanced Storage Driver (ASD) may be inserted in a layer above the base device drivers of the storage controllers/HBAs and act as a single virtual controller for access to the end target devices connected to the multiple physical storage controllers/HBAs so that at any point in time the resources of each of the controllers/HBAs may be dynamically allocated to the various requested operations. The ASD may have bi-directional communication with each controller/HBA firmware directly and/or with the base device driver associated with each controller/HBA in order to permit both direct and base device driver controlled communication with each of the physical controllers/HBAs. The ASD may further provide load sharing between the controllers/HBAs as well as fault tolerance functionality to reroute communications through a different controller/HBA in the event of a failure of one or more of the controllers/HBAs."

The patent application was filed on April 14, 2011 (13/087,233).